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There are these doohickeys called “Roman dodecahedrons“. They are little bronze (or occasionally stone) widgets, with holes in each of the twelve faces and spheres or pegs at each of the vertices, and the reason they’re called “dodecahedrons” is because no one knows what they’re actually for. There’s all sorts of speculation, from candle-holders to sophisticated sundials, but they aren’t mentioned anywhere in any documents we have.

Recently, someone decided that the dodecahedrons were knitting nancies, used for making gloves; they went so far as to 3D print a replica and film the knitting. (It’s a really boring video because about 3/5 of it is “and now we cast off”.)

Now, I’m not qualified to make judgements about whether these things were used as pipe gauges or sun-angle-measurers, but I can tell you one thing: they weren’t for knitting. Knitting is, you might say, an area of my expertise. I’ve actually typed up a list of reasons why, so that when yet another of my acquaintances posts about it going, “Hmmm, interesting”, I can just copy and paste. Here is that list.

1) The Romans didn’t have knitting. As far as we know, knitting as it’s known today was invented in the Middle East in ~1000 CE.

2) They did, however, have nalbinding, which they used to make socks with separate toes; if they wanted gloves, that’s how they’d have done them.

3) We have no evidence of knitting nancies earlier than the seventeenth century.

4) If you’re going to use something as a knitting nancy, you want pegs with slight swelling at the ends, not inverted cones or spheres, because bulgy pegs make it significantly harder to form the stitches.

5) The dodecahedrons range in diameter from 4 to 11 cm. Four centimeters is about an inch and a half; I don’t know who could wear gloves that size, but it wouldn’t be an adult.

6) Why make a complicated, expensive, heavy metal knitting nancy when a wooden disk with nails pounded around the hole in the middle works better?

7) Stuffing the completed bits into the center of the thing is stupid, because it leads to things being all mashed up and hard to move.

8) Your fingers aren’t all actually set on one line.

9) No glove pattern in the world uses the same number of stitches for all five fingers and..

10) …if one did, it wouldn’t be five, which is not nearly enough in any yarn that’s not so bulky as to be ludicrous. (If you watch the video, look at her fingers when she puts the gloves on. Does that look like something you’d want to depend on for warm hands?)

11) How exactly does one make the “body” of the glove?

12) The primary reason they think it was for gloves is that the holes are different sizes. However, the holes have no effect whatsoever on the size of the stitches; that’s all about the spacing of the pegs, which is the same all around.

It’s really tempting, when I see the Fake Geek Girl meme going around, to sit down and write a three-screen rant about my geek credentials. Like how I literally don’t remember how old I was the first time I saw MOVIE, how my bedtime story when I was six was BOOK, how I can quote along with EPISODE of SHOW, how I play GAME, GAME, and GAME. Name-dropping characters at every turn, of course.

Screw that.

I am a geek because I say I am, and if you don’t like it you can go pound sand.

I’ve got no excuse. It’s just been that kind of…well, year at this point.

I’m only recently back from Pennsic, at which I was in a play (six lines, no waiting. Well, actually, lots of waiting). A friend was knighted. I didn’t go to any classes this year, as I was in large part busy working on the costume for the play. But I did get to play D&D.

I appear to have a weird thing going on in regards to caffiene intake. That being, if I have tea (I don’t drink coffee) or cola or whatever three or more days in a row, I start being dead on my feet all the time and drinking more caffeine doesn’t help. Which is not quite a “caffeine addiction”, I don’t think.

I haven’t any real clue who reads this, aside from my mother (Hi, Mum!), but I am aware that I’ve been exceedingly lax these last several months; all I can tell you is that fandom has eaten my brain.

Specifically, Supernatural fandom, with occasional excursions into Sherlock and White Collar. (It has just now occurred to me that all three of these feature a tall, slim dark-haired guy with intense blue eyes. So, hey, maybe I have a type after all?) Tell you how bad it is: I made a new LiveJournal, because all the fanfic action seems to be happening on LJ. (No, I am not going to tell you the name. I’m sure someone who really wants to can figure it out, but really? No one wants to that much.)

Right now I’m in thoroughly enmeshed in this monster of a fic that’s eating my brain; I’m closing rapidly in on ten thousand words and I’m not even really out of the intro yet. This is not what I should be writing. I should be writing the thing for the challenge. But drafts for that aren’t due till after Pennsic, so it’s hard to get motivation…